NYTimes: For Lesser Crimes, Rethinking Life Behind Bars

No real Capital Region connection here, but there was an interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times on rethinking how our country hands out lifetime prison sentences for nonviolent offenders that I thought some of our Crime Confidential regulars might like to read.

Check out the story here (It’s long, but worth the time, in my opinion). Some of the more interesting statistics in the article:

“Most other countries do not impose life sentences without parole, and those that do generally reserve it for a few heinous crimes. In England, where it is used only for homicides involving an aggravating factor like child abduction, torture or terrorism, a recent study reported that 41 prisoners were serving life terms without parole. In the United States, some 41,000 are.”

“The United States has the highest reported rate of incarceration of any country: about one in 100 adults, a total of nearly 2.3 million people in prison or jail.”

“Half a million people are now in prison or jail for drug offenses, about 10 times the number in 1980, and there have been especially sharp increases in incarceration rates for women and for people over 55, long past the peak age for violent crime.”

“In all, about 1.3 million people, more than half of those behind bars, are in prison or jail for nonviolent offenses.”

“Nationally, about one in 40 children have a parent in prison. Among black children, one in 15 have a parent in prison.”

“…the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world’s population, still has nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners.”

6 Responses

America’s prisoners are the most violent. Release them all from prison but the “judges” and the politicos must be held accountable for their post “rehab” criminal acts of these thugs. Regarding the politicos, it would be a 3 pronged venture. They would embrace the votes of these individuals, legalize drugs and make much state revenue in addition to filling their pockets more.

John Q: How about this? You provide a source for your statistics and try to respond to the article rather than running off right-wing talking points. Then we can have a conversation.

According to the Pew Foundation, in 2008 incarceration rates were as follows: one out of 18 men, one in 89 women, one in 11 African-Americans (9.2 percent), one in 27 Latinos (3.7 percent), and one in 45 Caucasians (2.2 percent).

Black populations are largely concentrated in urban araes, where law enforcement is heaviest, so arrests are correspondingly higher. On drugs alone, and by percentage of the population, white people buy far more heroin and coke than blacks, but are incarcerated at a far lower rate. Why? Because law enforcement in the suburbs and rural areas, where a greater percentage of whites live, is a lot less.

Your unstated assumption John Q is that reason for high black incarceration rates is that they are somehow inferior to whites, because low white incarecartion levels are indicative of their moral superiority, and that sir is a racist idea.

Further, if your assertion is that people who come from intact families commit fewer crimes than people who come from single-parent families, then I await your whole-hearted support of gay marriage.

However, if you do agree with your own line of thinking then you must also agree that women are superior to men based upon their lower incarceration levels.

I’m sure feminists and gay activists the world-over are trilled with your support.